The secret of the law of attraction

"I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering." - Steven Wright

Today I want to pass along a secret. It's from an old friend of mine, John Genzale. He was working in New York and I was visiting, and we were walking along Central Park, near the Metropolitan Museum. That's when he confessed his secret, prefacing it with the fact that he'd confided it to only three people because he knew how ridiculous it sounded.

This was his secret career dream: To combine the two things he loved most in the world, Italy and baseball, by owning an Italian baseball team. If you'd known John and his situation, you'd know that this was wildly improbable. After all, he'd been a newspaper editor and a columnist for a trade magazine, which doesn't put you in the fat-cat team-owner club. He didn't live in Italy. He didn't even speak Italian.

So what happened to John? No, he doesn't own an Italian baseball team. However, he was recently named commissioner of the Italian Baseball League. That means that he did indeed find a way to combine his two loves, Italy and baseball. Pretty cool, eh?

When I mentioned John's story to a coworker, she reacted by saying that he could be a case study for the bestseller, "The Secret." That title makes me smile, because the message of the book - the power of positive thinking and the "law of attraction" - is a "secret" on the level of, say, "buy low, sell high."

However, let me back up and say that my own experience with the law of attraction has not been . . . well, magnetic. Way back in high school, one of my teachers persuaded me to read the work of Norman Vincent Peale, and while still a teenager I became a believer in positive thinking. At the time, the one thing I absolutely believed would transpire was my future career . . . playing in the NBA.

Our high school basketball coach was also a devotee of mind over anything. One evening he told some of us players that he'd learned to dunk a basketball by picturing it in his mind, what we would later learn to call "visualization." At the time, we were standing on outdoor courts after a summer league game, and one of my teammates urged him to demonstrate. So he closed his eyes, and we watched his face go through the approach, take-off, dunk and triumph. Then he said, "Gimme the ball," and he set about bringing his vision to life.

Maybe it was the extra few pounds he had put on since playing, or maybe a tiny negative thought sneaked into his mind midleap, but when he flew up fiercely for a two-handed dunk, he floated past the rim, or at least his body floated past - the ball and his hands banged into the rim and seemed to stick there, while momentum took the rest of him arching up toward the backboard, whereupon gravity, that old negative thinker, caught up to him and slammed him flat on the concrete.

He lay unconscious long enough that we had time to debate whether to go call for an ambulance (no cellphones back then) or put him in the back of a pick-up and drive him to the hospital. Then he came to, got up and limped to his car, without saying a word. Perhaps he was visualizing.

Well, my NBA plan met a similar fate. So I was left with some suspicions about the whole "if you want it badly enough" philosophy. Which takes me back to my old pal John, the commish. From a distance, it looks like career levitation. Where did John's efforts start and the law of attraction end?

First, he moved to Italy. Just moved. He had some continuing writing work, but without any real plan. And he continued to write about sports and a bit about Italian baseball. He eventually became friends with the man who controls much of the league, and it turned out that the Italians had been talking with the US leagues about investing in Italy. When the Americans asked for a bigger, more commercial baseball effort in Italy, John was there, a logical choice.

So what can we conclude about attraction? John didn't wait for his dream, he got on a plane and flew to it. Then, once in Italy, he got himself involved in baseball. In other words, he grabbed the two halves of the dream, stuck them together and held them that way till they stuck. Looking closer, it seems the law of attraction had some help from the chemistry of glue.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.